What Dallas home values would look like without a housing bubble

What Dallas home values would look like without a housing bubble

At least one good thing came out of the housing bubble: DFW home values.
Photo courtesy of Ebby Halliday/Shoot 2 Sell

Imagine an alternate reality where the housing bubble never happened. This might sound like fantastic news for the majority of people who bought a home at its overvalued peak in 2007, but it wouldn’t affect Dallas-Fort Worth homeowners in the way you’d expect.

Zillow ran the numbers for 30 major metros and found that our home values have improved much more than others’ since the market collapse. More interesting, local homeowners fared much better with the housing bubble.

The median U.S. home remains 4.9 percent less valuable than it was at its peak in April 2007. Dallas homes right now, however, are 29.1 percent more valuable, second only to Denver’s wild 45 percent increase.

Poor Las Vegas is still struggling the hardest, at 29.7 percent below where it was a decade ago.

But even if the country as a whole breaks even with prior peak housing bubble prices — which experts have predicted would happen by late 2017 — that still doesn’t mean a full recovery.

That’s because if home values had grown steadily at historic rates (1985-1999), rather than boom and bust and boom in the last 16 years, the median U.S. home would be worth 26 percent more today than it actually is. Without the housing bubble, Zillow says the median U.S. home value would be $235,000. Instead, it’s $187,00.

But in Dallas, the median home price is $189,500 as of the second quarter of 2016. If historical growth rates had persisted, that number today would be a measly $131,300.